


A Time to Every Purpose

by fandomfan



Category: Black Sails
Genre: (a Pagan/Christian/Jewish variety pack), Canon Compliant, First Kiss, First Time, Fluff, Future Fic, Holiday Fic Exchange, Holidays, Intensive Sweetness, Jewish John Silver, M/M, Not sure James Flint will ever be as well-adjusted as he is in this story, Post-Canon, Reunion Fic, Romance, Treasure Island Compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-20
Updated: 2018-12-20
Packaged: 2019-09-23 06:06:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17074808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fandomfan/pseuds/fandomfan
Summary: John returns to James, and they work through a year of holidays getting back together.





	A Time to Every Purpose

**Author's Note:**

  * For [stompe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stompe/gifts).



> Dearest [stompe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stompe),  
> I hope this satisfies your desire for "anything holiday themed". I sorta took that concept and ran with it. Happy SFHC2018!

**WINTER**

 

John Silver arrives on James’s doorstep on the twenty-fifth of December.  He has aged more years than the calendar would show for their time apart, but he is unmistakably himself.  James is somehow unsurprised to find him there, as though a door long left standing agape inside himself has been gently, snugly shut.

James has spent years raging and weeping and wondering through the maze of his sentiments about this man.  Now that he is here in the flesh, the primary thing James feels is relief.

When he shrugs and gestures Silver into his small house, Silver gives him a disbelieving “Really?” but enters all the same.

“What did you imagine, coming here?” James asks in response, gesturing Silver to a chair at the kitchen table.

“Honestly?” Silver says, wary, but shaded with the youthful impertinence James remembers well.  “I imagined you would hold me at snarling swordpoint until Thomas Hamilton convinced you to allow me in, likely out of his own curiosity over anything else.”  He gives a tentative grin, and James flashes to salt sea air in his face and the dark joy of daring plans afoot.  Lord, that feels so long ago.

“If you’d come ten years back, I suspect that would have been a likely scenario,” James admits.  “But I’ve long since spent all the rage that was in me.”  He swallows, then adds, “And a fever took Thomas three years ago.”  It is not so long past that he can say it without his heart still clenching in his chest, nor so recent that the clenching lasts more than a few moments.

“I’m sorry.  Truly,” Silver says, looking down at the tabletop with a grimace.  Then, quietly, “I thought often of the two of you here, living side by side, making each other happy.  It made _me_  happy.”

James can’t help the wave of pain-touched fondness that comes over him at this.  “We had that.  Years of it.  Knowing you’d brought it about made it a great deal easier to forgive you.”

Silver’s bright eyes—that shocking, splendid blue—cut swiftly to James’s with a suspiciously liquid glint.  “Do you?” he asks.  “Forgive me?”  And for a moment, his look shows something profound that James cannot parse.

“Long ago,” James answers.

This is assuredly not what he envisioned for his quiet Christmas night.

Silver dashes a hand across his face and puts his charmer’s grin back on.  “This is a far cry from how I thought this night would go,” he admits.

James cannot help but laugh.  Silver watches him quizzically until James clarifies.  “It seems our minds still run in tandem,” he says, and the honest pleasure in Silver’s answering smile warms James quite a bit more than he expects.

*

After that, Silver just… stays.

He fits into James’s life without much ado at all and little more discussion.

It is odd, when James pauses to give it thought.  He’d imagined their reunion happening in many different ways during the long years of their separation.  Like Silver, he'd once thought they might fight, swords and words alike staining them with blood and fury.  As he and Thomas found their slow way back to each other, he’d admitted to himself—and eventually to Thomas—that he was grateful to Silver for so comprehensively changing his life’s path when he was incapable of doing so himself.  That admission led to his imagining Silver’s return filled with tearful embraces and healthful solace.  Eventually there was a period where James envisioned finding Silver again, to fall at once into his arms in the more carnal, fervent way they’d always skirted round and never made real.  Thomas enjoyed hearing about those visions most of all.

All his scenarios involved dramatic emotional confrontations of one sort or another, which makes it a welcome surprise when the reality of it comes so smooth and easy.

It does take them some short time to achieve their ease.  Silver is painfully tentative at first, moving as quietly as he can in his first days in James’s house, hardly speaking and tossing an unending supply of uncertain glances at James whenever he thinks James isn’t watching.  The moment he releases his wariness comes on the eve of the new year, a week past his sudden Yuletide appearance.

“Should I presume from your silence that your storytelling days are behind you?” James asks him, as the wind swirls outside the walls and the two of them eat together by the hearth fire.

“Pardon?” Silver looks up from the intense study he’s been making of his supper.

“You’ve kept a quiet tongue in your head since you’ve been here, when I very clearly recall a man with an unmatched way for words,” James says.  “What else but a story is better suited to while away the long, dark hours?”

Silver lifts his brows with a salacious grin that brings a flustered fillip to James’s belly.  Ah, so that’s still there between them, then.

“True, there is that,” James accedes.  “Though I think tonight is not the night for it.”  He is privately pleased by Silver’s flash of obvious surprise.  “I suppose,” he says honestly, “that I simply miss your voice.”

Silver stares at him, goggle-eyed.  “Who are you, and what have you done with James Flint?” he asks.

James laughs gently.  “I have not been that man for many years now,” he says.  “I think you’ll find, if you decide to remain here—which I am certainly amenable to, should you be wondering, as you have not yet asked—that James Hamilton, carpenter of the Province of Pennsylvania, is in many ways different to James Flint, dread pirate captain of the West Indies.”

Silver, in his long, frogged coat and sun-worn skin, still looks much more like he belongs on a quarter deck in the West Indies than at a homely Pennsylvania kitchen table.  He studies James silently for a few long moments, then asks, “And you would just… welcome me back to your life?  Simple as that?”

“Simple is not how I'd put it,” James sighs.  “But I have lost my taste for resentment, and have always preferred to share my home when the choice is mine.  I am too old to play at asking only sidelong for what I want, or to not ask at all, so I ask you: will you stay?”

The hesitancy that has colored Silver’s presence this past week seems to drop from his shoulders like a cloak cast to the floor.  He nods an acknowledgement at James, open and eager.  “I would very much like to stay and come to know this James Hamilton, carpenter of the Province of Pennsylvania.  And if he'd like a story for a cold night, I think I have just the tale to tell.”

James can feel the smile stretching broad across his face in a way it hasn’t often since Thomas passed.  “You provide the story.  I’ll provide the drink to wash it down.”

He fetches two cups and the bottle of rum he keeps in the cupboard, and Silver proceeds to offer him a fascinating account of a cache of pirate treasure, an insistent youth called Hawkins, and a very improbably named parrot.  It may even, James thinks amidst shared laughter and rum-fuelled warmth, be the truth.

It is an auspicious beginning to the new year.

 

{}{}{}

 

**SPRING**

 

From there, their lives progress.  Silver takes to tending the garden and the chickens and the endless household repairs.  He slowly comes to meet—and charm—the families who live nearest James, and in a great twist of irony that brings James no end of amusement, he has become an exceedingly talented cook.  The second set of hands around the house means James has more time to spend at his carpentry, and he finds delight in once again taking up the production of small toys and curios alongside the furniture by which he makes his living.

Silver takes the never-before-used second bedroom that was meant to lend credence to James and Thomas’s status as widower cousins.  Somewhere in those next few months, James stops thinking of the house as ‘mine’, and the tender little word ‘ours’ returns to his vocabulary.

They fit well together, he and John Silver.

When they do, inevitably, bed one another, it is in the spring, as the buds and bulbs emerge from their winter of hiding and the pastor of the church James does not attend commissions a new lectern to be carved in honour of Easter.

James completes and delivers the lectern, spends his Sunday morning in shared silence with the Quakers Thomas had introduced him to, and returns home to find Silver, shirtless beside their well, bathing outdoors in the chilled fresh air of early spring.

The unstudied beauty of this life-weathered man takes James’s breath from his lungs.

Silver is humming to himself as he rinses water across his chest.  His trousers are soaked through, clinging to the different lengths of his two strong legs and offering none of the modesty Silver presumably thought he was upholding by not removing said trousers in the first place.

James watches appreciatively for a moment more, then strides decisively towards Silver, who spies him about four paces before he arrives.

Silver leans back against the rim of the well wall.  James places his two hands slowly and deliberately at either side of Silver’s hips, slim still, all these years gone.  He lets his gaze meander up from his hands to Silver’s face, and he does so very, very slowly.  Silver is watching him, smiling like a sable fox.

“John,” James murmurs.

“James,” John purrs.

James reaches one hand up to pull free the tie holding that head of wild curls at bay.  He buries his hand against the back of John’s skull, kneading until John hums and pushes back against James’s fingers.

“I’d like to kiss you now,” he says.  “And then I’d like to take you inside to my bed and fuck you until we are both wrecked with the pleasure of it.”

“Yes,” John sighs, already reaching for James.  “I’d like that.”

And so he does, and it feels like rebirth.

*

James makes several startling discoveries that afternoon.  As he is ardently acquainting himself with all of John’s skin, he finds that John, for all his years at sea, bears no tattoos.  Shortly thereafter, James becomes intimately aware that John's cock—and what a specimen it is—bears a notable difference from James’s own.

He marks his discoveries, but is otherwise occupied and so puts his tongue to better use.

Later, as sweat cools across their bodies, he plays his fingertips along John’s unmarked skin and admires his spent, cut cock and says, “You never told me you were a Jew.”

John chuckles and butts his forehead into James’s shoulder playfully.  He has proved an adept, enthusiastic lover, which surprises James not a jot.  “When, pray tell, would I have had time or cause to share with you my most defining Abrahamic trait?”

“I'm sorry we never found time for it, years ago,” James says honestly.  “As for cause… if respect and love and lustfulness count as cause, then I had all those aplenty.”

John lifts up onto his elbow to smile down at James.  It is sweet and also a shade sad.  “As did I,” he says, and cups James’s cheek in one large, warm palm.

James holds John’s eyes as he turns his head to press a long kiss into that palm.  “Well, I am glad you have shown me your trait now,” he says, laying back into his pillow and pulling John down to rest his head on James’s shoulder.

John rumbles happily while James pets through his long hair, admiring how the spring sunshine glints off the greying strands that hide amidst the dark curls.  They lie in contented, companionable silence for some minutes, until a thought strikes James.

“So when you came back to me in December, you did not mean to make yourself my Christmas gift?” he asks.

John laughs, a light, free peal of sound.  “I’m afraid not,” he says.  “It was entirely a coincidence of the calendar.”

James snorts dismissively.  “I have lived too long for coincidence.  Besides, my version would sound far superior in the retelling, I think you’ll agree.”

John turns to look up at James.  He is smiling as though his face cannot make any other shape.  “As the Captain orders, so shall the story go,” he decrees.  “Let the official tale be told that I came when I did to be a gift for this Christian man, carefully planned for a festivity I do not observe in a religion not my own.”

“Hebrew scoundrel,” James teases, and John’s eyes crinkle at the corners as he mimes a blow to the heart.

They both laugh and fall to wrestling and tickling each other like boys, which leads on to kissing and touching each other like men, and when they finally come to stillness again, John rises up once more to an elbow to watch James in fond silence.

“I suppose, then, this time of year does not feel like resurrection for you,” James muses, gone philosophical and muzzy-headed with affection.

“No,” John says softly as he pushes a stray lock of James’s own greying hair from his eyes.  “For me it feels like deliverance.”

 

{}{}{}

 

**SUMMER**

 

Spring grows green things and new life and a quiet, peaceful sort of love that suits James well.

It is summer when he tells John of his love, as they are working together in the vegetable patch.  John flushes rosy and kisses him, which is not surprising, and then bursts into tears, which is.

James holds him and makes soothing noises until he calms.

“I’m sorry,” John says.  “Also I love you, too, which perhaps I should have said first.”  He smiles out of a tear-streaked face, and James’s body floods golden warm with how entirely dear John is to him.

“You needn’t be sorry,” he tells John.  “If you would like to tell me why my confessions of love induce weeping, I might find better ways to speak of it in the future.”  He is only teasing, but John begins to look alarmed, so James hurries on.  “Or, I might learn just how to render you tearfully defenseless when it suits me.”  He nudges a finger under John’s chin.  “Say, when I want you to bake the biscuits I like.  Or when I’ve torn a shirt I don’t want to mend.”  Now John is smiling again, rolling his red-rimmed eyes at James.  James waggles his eyebrows in return and continues, “Or when I’d like to have you bare underneath me in our bed.”

At this John finally laughs, which has, of course, been James’s intent.  “You lecherous old fool,” he chuckles.  “As though you need expend even the slightest effort to get me there.”

James kisses him.  When he pulls back, John is looking at him so earnestly, it’s near painful to see.

“James,” he whispers.  “I have loved you every single minute of my life since you told me you intended to sacrifice yourself for your men that night in the maroons’ cage.  I must have loved you before then, only that’s when I knew it for what it was.”

They are standing in the summer sunshine outside a simple house in Pennsylvania, and John takes James’s face between his hands and tells him about the love he has borne for James.  Through victory and defeat, through joys and pains, whether they were together or separated, John says he has loved him.  John talks and talks, pouring out his longing and his heartache and the memories of James he has treasured through the years when he never thought they’d be reunited.  It seems to ease something in John, to speak of all this, which by turn eases something in James he did not know was troubled.

Eventually John’s voice goes hoarse and then quiet, by which time they are sat side by side on the porch.  John rests his head on James’s shoulder, and James wraps an arm around the lean strength of him as they watch the summer swallows dip and whirl through the air.

“It is Midsummer today,” James says, eventually.

John makes an agreeing sort of noise.

“Which means we’ll have the most sunlight of the year,” James continues, toying with the ends of John’s hair at his fingertips.  “Which means that we can sit here some time yet and still have the sun through the bedroom window later to let you watch just how I intend to thank you for what you’ve shared with me today.”

John turns to look up with a desirous gleam in his eye.  “I’m much more interested in the bedroom thanking part of that plan.”

James laughs heartily.  “As, I confess, am I,” he says.  “I love you,” he adds for good measure and stands with an audible pop from his left knee.

John takes James’s proffered hand to be hauled up beside him.  “I love you, too, old man,” he says.  “Now come inside and let me fuck you.”

They make very enjoyable use of the long sunlit hours.

 

{}{}{}

 

**AUTUMN**

 

The days shorten and grow cool.  One autumn night, John, who has spoken little more about the faith he was born to, bakes a bread shaped like a large, round plait, and gives James something new to learn.

“I’ve had little to do with Judaism throughout my life, and I still don’t see myself a religious man,” he says, quiet but steady.  “But tonight is the start of a new year by Jewish reckoning, and I’d like to mark this one if you don’t mind.”

James has asked John about his people and done what reading he’s been able to find, but John is still more or less silent about what is obviously a harrowing past, and books are in woefully short supply in their small community.  He has learned by now that pressing John for more information will likely only lead him to draw away and go quiet and pained.  So, though it is not his nature, James has given in and accepted that he may never know this part of John.  Now that John is offering something up freely, James tries to hide just how keen he is.

“Go on as you’d like,” he says, then listens as John intones a chant in what James is fairly sure is Hebrew.  He knows the word for God as he hears  _Adonai_ near the start and is able to add his own _amen_  at the end when John finishes his prayer with that familiar word in an unfamiliar accent.

John proceeds to eat quietly and doesn’t share anything further, but his quiet is introspective rather than distressed, and it is not an uncomfortable meal.  At the end of it, John sets out a plate of cut apples and a small pot of honey.  He dips a slice in the honey and offers it to James, who bites it neatly from his hand.

“Sweet things to bring a sweet new year,” he explains, soft and fond and petting one sticky fingertip over James’s lips.  James can only kiss that finger before dipping his own bit of apple in the honey and feeding it to John in return.

“To a sweet new year,” he smiles as John kisses his fingers sweetly indeed.

“It’s _Shanah Tovah_  in Hebrew,” John offers gently.

And James answers back, “Shanah Tovah.”

*

A week or so later, John refuses supper and tells James he’d like to spend the next day alone and that he’ll fast through it.  He has been a muted, inward-looking presence throughout the week, telling James little more than that it is the season of High Holy Days.  It’s been a subdued time, but a reflective one, full of shared tranquility as James has watched John and stepped gently.  Tonight, John says, “Today and tomorrow is Yom Kippur, which is a time for atoning.  I have a long list of wrongs I would like to think on and let go.  Will you be all right if I take my leave tomorrow until sunset?”

He suspects John must need this observance quite deeply, and he can guess at some of the reasons.  “I’m perfectly capable of managing my own affairs for a day,” he agrees easily enough.  “I’ll miss you, of course, but do what you like, and I’ll be all the happier to see you return home.”

They’re only plain facts, but his words provoke John's most guileless smile.  “I love you very much, James,” he says.  He curls tightly into James in bed that night, content to be held, and he’s gone in the morning, leaving James’s breakfast on the table for him.

*

John returns shortly after sundown, and says another Hebrew prayer over the supper James has laid out for them.  He seems lighter for his day alone in the woods or wherever he took himself off to.  There is something looser in his shoulders upon his return, a relief about his eyes that James is glad to see.

They eat in companionable ease, John asking how James spent his day and James recounting the excitement of the Foster boy at the nearest farm when James brought him the set of carved wood animals he’s been working on for several weeks.  John answers with more smiles than words, until after supper, when he pulls James to sit with him on their bed.

“I have not been what I should have been for many of the people in my life,” John says into the quiet.  “I lived too long only for my own ends, and when I found myself somehow loved, I wasn’t able to return it as I wish I could have.”  James thinks, inescapably, of Madi.  John has not said what happened between them, but James suspects she has occupied a great deal of John’s thoughts today and for the preceding days.

“Despite all that,” John goes on, and now he lifts a hand to James’s temple to run fingers through his hair, “I have found myself here, in this life we've built together so fluidly.  I think about all the trials we went through years ago, and all the time that has passed, and now to be here with such peace and such love and so little torment… I don't know how or why but I can only see the hand of something greater at work to make this real.  To have caused me to be here, with you, my _bashert_ …”  He trails off.

“Explain bashert,” James prompts softly when John stays silent.

It pulls John’s focus back to him.  “It means something like ‘beloved’ and ‘destined one’ and ‘meant to be’ and ’soulmate’, which should give you a reasonable idea of how I feel about you.”  His smile has a touch of gentle self-mockery about it.

James must kiss him.  He does, and he makes it deep and warm and as sweet as he can.  “From where I sit, in my advanced age and wisdom,” he murmurs into the scant space between their lips when he pulls back only far enough to see John’s smiling eyes, “you’ve been the great bringer of love and happiness to my life.”  He laughs softly at John’s furrowed brow and forestalls the protest he can see coming.  “Yes, yes, I know.  I was there for everything else, as well,” he says.  “But nevertheless it’s true.  You came to me first when I was a monster of rage and misery, and you showed me something new.  When you couldn’t see a way forward for us together, you gave Thomas back to me, that I might find joy, even at the cost of your own.”

John is crying now, and his cheeks have gone red as a flame, but he is still smiling through it, so James carries on, cradling John’s beloved face in both hands.  “And when I thought I’d outlived all the love anyone could hope for in any lifetime and made my peace with going on quietly alone, there you were again.  My Jewish Christmas gift,” here John chuffs a laugh, “come back into my life with yet more love in your hands.  If bashert is all you say it is, it seems that you must be mine, as well.”

It is imperative here that he break off to kiss John some more.  They are both tearful now, and laughing, too, so the kisses are lacking in finesse.  But they are many, and they are in earnest.  In such earnest.

Call it divine providence.  Credit it to a Hebrew God or a Christian one or to no God but fate or good chance.  James will not stop to question what has led him to this life.  He will only take it, gladly, gratefully, and count himself lucky for having John Silver as his own, and hope that he can succeed at deserving what he has been granted.

 

{}{}{}

 

**WINTER**

 

That winter, as the year comes to its close, they fill their snug little house with candles and pine boughs.  They sit together by the fire with warm mugs and tell each other stories of the season.  John speaks of lamps whose light lasts and lasts, sustaining hope in the darkness.  James talks of a singular man born from mystery to speak wisdom and lead many.  They keep each other warm through the long, cold night of Midwinter.  And on the thirty-first of December, they kiss as the clock chimes twelve in the dark, beginning a new year as they mean to go on for many more to come.

 

 


End file.
